Consider the decision science of finance, perhaps the most pervasive organizational
framework. The DuPont model we are familiar with today emerged in the early 1900’s. It used
the data from the accounting processes and provided a framework to allocate financial capital to
diverse business units using more than the traditional accounting measure of profit. This
decision framework showed that business units with lower profit margins could easily have
higher returns on invested capital, and showed how business units could improve their return on
capital even without increasing profit margins.